Ravitch answers Gates
In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary." It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor. Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.
Report: Number of 'dropout factories' declines
The number of U.S. “dropout factory” high schools declined from 2002 through 2008, a new report says, but close to 40 percent of minority students continue to fail to graduate with their class. According to the report, called "Building a Grad Nation” and being released today, the pace of improvement is too slow to meet a national goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020. The number of dropout factory high schools fell by 261, from a high of 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008, a decline of 13 percent, the report said, and the actual number of students in these schools dropped by 15 percent. “Dropout factories,” first identified by Johns Hopkins University researchers early in this decade, are defined as schools at which less than 60 percent of students who started as freshmen are still enrolled four years later. Half of the nation’s dropouts are believed
